Hackaday Podcast Episode 313: Capacitor Plague, Wireless Power, and Tiny Everything

We’re firmly in Europe this week on the Hackaday podcast, as Elliot Williams and Jenny List are freshly returned from Berlin and Hackaday Europe. A few days of mingling with the Hackaday community, going through mild panic over badges and SAOs, and enjoying the unique atmosphere of that city.

After discussing the weekend’s festivities we dive right into the hacks, touching on the coolest of thermal cameras, wildly inefficient but very entertaining wireless power transfer, and a restrospective on the capacitor plague from the early 2000s. Was it industrial espionage gone wrong, or something else? We also take a moment to consider spring PCB cnnectors, as used by both one of the Hackaday Europe SAOs, and a rather neat PCB resistance decade box, before looking at a tryly astounding PCB blinky that sets a new miniaturisation standard.

In our quick roundup the standouts are a 1970s British kit synthesiser and an emulated 6502 system written in shell script, and in the can’t-miss section we look at a new contender fro the smallest microcontroller, and the posibility that a century of waste coal ash may conceal a fortune in rare earth elements.

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Episode 312 Show Notes:

What’s that Sound?

• If you know what that sound was, and we think you probably do, put your name down here to be in the drawing for the t-shirt.

Interesting Hacks of the Week:

• The Capacitor Plague Of The Early 2000s
• Make Your Cheap Thermal Camera Into A Microscope
• Transmitting Wireless Power Over Longer Distances
• A Decade Resistance Box From PCBs
• World’s Smallest Blinky, Now Even Smaller
• Writing A GPS Receiver From Scratch

Quick Hacks:

• Elliot’s Picks:
  • Reviving A Maplin 4600 DIY Synthesizer From The 1970s
  • Make Fancy Resin Printer 3D Models FDM-Friendly
  • Chemistry Meets Mechatronics In This Engaging Art Piece
  • Current Mirrors Tame Common Mode Noise
  • Speeding Up Your Projects With Direct Memory Access
• Jenny’s Picks:
  • Pick Up A Pebble Again
  • Turning Down The Noise On SMPS
  • A 6502, In The Shell
  • Repairing A Kodak Picture Maker Kiosk

Can’t-Miss Articles:

• • Ask Hackaday: What Would You Do With The World’s Smallest Microcontroller?
  • From The Ashes: Coal Ash May Offer Rich Source Of Rare Earth Elements